Suddenly, piercing, shrill, she heard, fierce, imperative, a cry. And a head thrust itself between her and the ax. She felt a girl’s arms about her. The ax lowered, slowly. The fingers of the great hand removed themselves from her neck. Hamilton felt Ugly Girl kiss her. “Ugly Girl,” she wept, then lost consciousness.
27
Hamilton opened her eyes. Her body stiffened, but she was held. She half lay, and was half sitting; Ugly Girl’s arm was about her shoulders, holding her up. She felt a gourd, broken, brimmed with water, held to her lips. She drank. She tried to pull away from Ugly Girl but could not do so. Ugly Girl, with the strength of her people, was much stronger than she. Then she drank again. Hamilton half lay, half sat, held by Ugly Girl, on a shelf of rock, on boughs. Hamilton moved her legs. She looked upon her ankles. They were free of leather capture shackles. Her hand went to her throat, half expecting to find a tether upon it. But she was not secured in any way. “Thank you,” she whispered to Ugly Girl, in the language of the Men. Ugly Girl grimaced, trying to imitate the smile of the Men. Ugly Girl withdrew the gourd, and withdrew her arm from about Hamilton. Hamilton drew her legs beneath her, on the shelf of rock. She was clothed. She wore a rough garment of crudely scraped skin, chewed and beaten. It covered her breasts, and body. The garment was too large for her, for the bodies of the women of the Ugly People are broader than those of the women of the Men; it was belted at the waist with a hide rope. On one of the short women of the Ugly People it would have fallen below the knees; on Hamilton, who was taller, it did not reach her knees.
Hamilton must have looked frightened, for Ugly Girl made soft clucking noises to her, to pacify her.
Hamilton looked out the wide mouth of the shallow cave. She could see brush, trees.
She could escape!
She reached out again for the gourd of water. Ugly Girl handed it to her, and, again Hamilton drank.
On the other side of the cave, squatting down, was the woman of the Ugly People. She was moving hide string through two pieces of leather, sewing. The large, widely set eyes looked up at Hamilton, curiously. Near her, standing against the other side of the cave, was a small boy, his head almost a fifth the size of his broad body; he was roundshouldered, long-armed; his jaw was receded; his hair had been cut with stone from his face; he might have been eight years of age.
He pointed at Hamilton, and said a word. Ugly Girl laughed. Hamilton felt uneasy.
The mother seemed to assent to what the boy had said. She, too, repeated the word, and looked down, smiling, to return to her sewing.
Hamilton tried to say the word. It was hard for her to pronounce.
Ugly Girl laughed at her miserable effort. It made Hamilton angry that Ugly Girl, in her stupidity, should laugh at one who was human.
Hamilton looked again to the wide mouth of the cave.
Her body, subtly, tensed. She was, concealing the intent, readying herself to dart for the opening. Ugly Girl, smiling, put her hand gently on Hamilton’s knee. She shook her head. Hamilton angrily brushed aside Ugly Girl’s hand. Then Hamilton looked away, as though to consider other parts of the cave. Ugly Girl stepped back. Hamilton swung her legs over the side of the shelf. Then, suddenly, Hamilton sprang to her feet and darted toward the opening. She stopped suddenly, almost losing her balance, some feet before the opening, for, at that moment, in the opening, appeared the short, broad frame of the male of the Ugly People. Hamilton, terrified, stepped back, retreating from him. In his hand he held the short ax, so mighty, yet more shortly handled than the axes of the Men. On his left shoulder, steadied there, by his left hand, was the body of a deer. He did not raise the ax against Hamilton, but regarded her, puzzled. Hamilton backed from him. Then, against her back, she felt the shelf of rock. But yesterday this brute, without a thought, save for the intercession of Ugly Girl, would have crushed her head between a rock and the blade of his ax. He looked at her. Hamilton approached him, submissively, looking down, and knelt before him, the monster, putting her head to the stone, desperate to pacify him, in her femaleness to make obeisance to the male in him, to be pleasing to him, to plead with him for her life. She, a human female, kissed the stone before the feet of the short, mighty male of the Ugly People. Then, timidly, trying to smile, she looked up. She was startled. He was regarding her, stupidly. The males of the Men, she knew, expected and demanded, thereby triggering and releasing, complete subservience behavior in their females; they produced stimulus situations in which her blood instincts had no choice but to bare themselves, detonating the fantastic psychophysiological reflex, or response, of female submission to the aggressive, mightier animal, the male. Cringing and smiling in a female, she knew, warded off male wrath; it indicated with her body that, if she should be spared, she would be his work object and his sexual pleasure-object. But the male of the Ugly People looked at her, puzzled. Then she realized that the males of the Ugly People did not relate to their females as did the males of the Men. They were of a different species. She rose to her feet, and backed away from him. He did not approach her. He looked to his own woman. Suddenly Hamilton felt contempt for him. He was a male. Yet he did not make her his slave. He could do so, if he wanted, but he did not do so. Hamilton felt emotions of both relief, for she did not wish to be the slave of the monster, and irritation, and frustration, for, triggered by fear, her slave reflex had not been satisfied. Too, suddenly, almost unaccountably in her mind, she despised the male of the Ugly People. He was strong, stronger even than most of the human males doubtless, but yet, too, so weak, so stupid. She saw, in his broad back, as he squatted near his woman, and threw the deer down to the floor of the cave, both weakness and strength. His woman rubbed her nose along the side of his neck, and he grunted and thrust his head to her shoulder. Hamilton stood back, her arms folded, her feet widely spread. She held the male of the Ugly People in contempt. She did not feel then he was a true male. He is weak, she thought. This kind will not survive. They are too weak to survive. The male, she thought, irritably, who does not make his female his slave, either cannot do so, and is a weakling, or is a fool. If I were a male, she thought, I would make my females slaves, the pretty, weak, lovely little things! Since when, in nature, does the strong not dominate the weak? Since the weak have crippled the strong, she told herself, thereby denying the strong their birthright, and, inadvertently, in the same act, to their own frustration, depriving themselves of theirs as well, the opportunity to join in that contest in which, in any normal situation, she will meet her defeat, that contest which, if truly carried out, must terminate with her conquest, her joyful, abject surrender to the will, the absolute domination, of the mightier animal, the male. She realized then that male dominance has little to do, directly, with physical strength, though it is customarily linked with it. An extremely strong man, physically, she recognized, could be, and sometimes was, a psychological weakling, emasculated and petty, unable to satisfy complete dimensions of a female’s nature; sometimes such men even prided themselves on this form of impotence; sometimes, Hamilton suspected, such men, out of hostility and spite, and self-hatred, and hatred for women, refused to recognize the desperate wants of their lovers, scorning them for the realities of their genetic nature; refusing to respond to the most obvious, most desperate and profound unspoken pleas; and should the woman repudiate her conditionings, cast aside her guilts, and, humiliating herself, shamelessly beg, “Dominate me!” such men, frightened, knowing themselves unable to fulfill her needs, might laugh at her, thus ventilating hysterical anxiety, or pretend not to understand, or look upon her strangely, and deny her, thus making her miserable, making her suffer, in a culturally approved form of sadism; the female is not, Hamilton conjectured, simply a physical organism, but a psychophysical organism, and her blood needs for submission to a male express themselves beautifully in the totality of her response, not only in the weakening of her body, its secretions, its heightened sensitivity, its helplessness, its readiness, but in her psychic vulnerability, helplessly willing, waiting for him to impress his will upon her, to command her; she is eager to be made a mere instrument of his pleasure, eager to be subjected to his will, eager to be ruthlessly, uncompromisingly, dominated, eager to be, should he have the courage, literally the slave girl of a master; and should she be fortunate, it is just that which, perhaps to a thrill of horror, she finds herself to be. Once Hamilton had attempted to make aggressive love to Tree. He had struck her, bringing blood to her mouth. “Lie still, and endure,” he had told her. “I will tell you when to touch and caress.” “Yes, Master,” she had whispered. Few men, Hamilton thought, are strong enough to satisfy the slave in a woman. Few women, she thought, though all wish to be stripped and subdued, are fortunate enough to find a Master. Across thousands of years, remote from her own time, in an age of peril and barbarism, she had found hers, a hunter called Tree.